In an effort to bring people up to speed on the Dutch Open Competitions at LockCon, we are publishing the competition rules. The PDF below are rules for the Lockpicking, Impressioning and Lever lockpicking competition, exported from the ‘How to run LockCon’ document written by Walter in 2016.
We have a lockpicking, impressioning, disk detainer, and Lockpicking Pentathlon. The Pentathlon has five opening techniques which includes picking, lever lockpicking, car locks and much more.
The organizers will put up flip overs, on which you can register yourself for the competition.
Please be on time when the competition starts. We aim to have Impressioning on Friday afternoon, Lockpicking on Saturday afternoon, and the Pentathlon on Sunday.
Lockpicking
For LockCon 2023 we will run the lockpicking competition with locks commonly found in the Netherlands, in addition to locks kindly sponsored by Zeefeene and Nigel from Toool UK.
- The locks are pickable with normal lockpicks, of which we do not have a restriction for custom or commercial.
- We aim to have locks without a secondary locking system, I.e. sidebar.
- Applying torque on the tailpiece instead of using a tension wrench is allowed.
The time per round is adjusted for the difficulty of the lock, usually 5/10/15 minutes per round.
Impressioning
The Impressioning competition will be on Abus C83 locks, kindly sponsored by Abus. The first round will be an hour, and the A and B finals are planned to be six rounds of 15 minutes each.
In addition to the rules below, we added several small nuances to the rules:
- The tailpiece of the lock needs to be unobstructed. As in, no torque can be applied from the tailpiece. Please take care to mount the lock properly, and not pinch the tailpiece.
- Any newly invented tool or technique can only be used in the competition after explicit permission of the Judges.
Please see the Dutch Open Impressioning Championship 2022 report for more information on the competition. https://blackbag.toool.nl/?p=4222
Disk detainer competition
We will have a disk detainer lockpicking competition for the first time. For which, Sparrows kindly sponsored five of their disk detainer lockpicks. The competition will run throughout the event as a self timed competition.
- There will be three to five locks, from easy to fairly difficult.
- The supplied Sparrows DD tools are augmented with a 3D printed spacer designed by Thice. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5246593/files
- Locks are not guaranteed to be front tensioning, but can all be opened with the tools provided.
- Please keep the combinations a secret for others competing.
- The tools are not fragile, but shouldn’t be abused either. We have some spares, and come to the organizers if the tools are defective.
For people that are either new to disk detainers or don’t like competing, there will be tools and locks available to learn the technique, as well as workshops in picking high security disk detainers. We will also bring locks with much higher difficulty, starting at Abus plus with butterfly disks, to Tokoz Pro. Picking these high-end locks is left as an exercise to the attendees. (Maybe bring your own tools for these.)
Pentathlon
Our friends from Parmakey in Italy will host a pentathlon competition this year. It will include five lock opening techniques of the following list:
- Lockpicking pin tumbler: Bring your own tools
- Lockpicking dimple: Bring your own tools
- Impressioning: Bring your own tools
- Lockpicking lever locks: Tools are supplied
- Lockpicking car locks: Tools are supplied
The competition can only host a small group of participants, and will be fun to watch for everyone else.